Epiphanies

— When do you stop taking them seriously? It’s been a few years for me now. Same with breakthroughs, flashes of insight, and the like. I remember when I would have a little breakthrough, and become very excited, as if this, this new insight, completes me. Now I know. Everything’s different now. It all makes sense. I am whole.

When I was in college, all my short stories were about a sensitive, intellectual college guy ending in an epiphany. I remember one–it was called “The Conceptual Analysis of the Term ‘Love'”–in which a young man, much like myself, ends up wandering through an old college hall in the process of being remodeled, and has an epiphany while sitting at an old fashioned wooden desk watching asbestos motes in a sunbeam. The epiphany was, what? I don’t remember. It had to do with love. Or rather ‘love’. I think he runs back to his estranged girlfriend and tells her that he “blorgs” her.

Of course it’s all bullshit. Either I was wrong about the ultimate nature of myself and my relationship to the universe, or I wasn’t, in which case I made some marginal adjustments and everything was otherwise the same. Why am I talking about this? Well, I just noticed that I never had an epiphany about the basic uselessness of epiphanies. I seem to have just given them up. I suppose its like infatuation. It hits you, but you stop being fooled by it. You just accept it, like indigestion, or enjoy it, like a good movie-musical, knowing it to be orthogonal to your deeper concerns.